Call for proposals: Small Data in a Big Data World

CFP: Small Data in a Big Data World
Panel at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) 2013
to be held May 15-18, 2013 on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Recently the academic research world has been flooded with discussion of the uses and implications of ?Big Data.? For those of us whose research focuses on digital environments this discussion includes conferences, grants, special publications, and job announcements that focus on Big Data and the computational turn in social science and humanities research.

Big Data is not necessarily defined by the size of the data set, for humanities scholars have long been interested in huge textual and image-based corpora. Instead, Big Data refers to the increasing complexity of relationships between data objects in a given set, often requiring large-scale computational and algorithmic resources for analysis. Small Data research, on the other hand, often begins with a theoretical (e.g., critical race theory) or methodological (e.g., case study or ethnography) approach, which is then applied to digital data drawn from less-popular websites, YouTube videos, or even individual blog posts and comments.

Unfortunately, the tools used to analyze Big Data seem to be influencing modes of thought about new media and digital research away from the theoretical and towards the scientistic. For example, in a recent article Bruns and Burgess (2012) argue that humanist, interpretive studies of social media are ideosyncratic, non-repeatable, and non-verifiable. Although Bruns and Burgess concede that there is space for traditional qualitative methods, their suggestion is that these methods need to be integrated and innovated upon in a big data context.

Given the increasing amounts of attention (e.g., external funding, public policy, or student interest) ?big data? is accruing, where does this leave Small Data research and researchers? This panel seeks to explore the position of Small Data in relation to the discussion and/or use of Big Data. As the definition of Big Data is still in flux we are using Bruns & Burgess (2012) to ground our individual presentation. We are seeking presentations that will explore a variety of views on this turn toward Big Data and the impact on the researched, the researcher, and academia.